Off-World Introduction

[krpalmer]

I've heard it said in response to "money should be spent addressing problems on Earth before it's spent on fripperies like space travel" that the money is spent on Earth paying wages and buying things instead of being loaded into rockets and fired into the void. With that pointed out, I read in the newspaper today that a bit of money was loaded into a rocket, as Chris Hadfield, busy as always with public relations, introduced the next and final "polymer" Canadian banknotes to be put in wallets later this year. (A bit later on, I found a TV news clip online.) As the five dollar bill has the space station's "Canadarm" on it (and the ten dollar bill has a train on it), this is appropriate enough, but I did get to wondering just when Hadfield got the money, as he launched over four months ago. While we'd known what would be going on these bills for a while now, and I could suppose Hadfield was given them before his own launch, it does amuse me to imagine them being fit into a recent cargo rocket...